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Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Books

Farhad Manjoo over at Slate has written the best summation to date on Amazon's 1984 scandal, in which digital versions of the Orwell classic were surreptitiously removed from users' Kindles without their permission.

Amazon has apologized and promised never to delete books in this fashion in the future. But Manjoo points out that the real lesson here is that the power to delete digital books remotely exists in the first place:

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith labors in obscurity to make information appear and disappear at the whims of the Ministry of Truth:

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

The Ministry of Truth would have truly appreciated DRM and tethered devices. As many owners of Kindle e-books discovered this morning, electronic books that come rigged with DRM "copy protection," stored on e-book readers subject to Amazon remote control, can be made to disappear at the whims of their publishers, as if they never existed in the first place.

There is mounting concern in somequarters that the Google Book Search settlement (see previous posts here, here, and here) could have anticompetitive effects. Everyone (including Google) seems to agree that, all else being equal, we shouldn't want a world where Google is the only entity that is scanning and providing online access to books, particularly the majority of out-of-print books whose owners can't be found (i.e., "orphan works").

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, here's one that vividly illustrates why putting DRM on e-books is short-sighted, futile, and doomed. If you must have words, here are a few explaining this photo. And here are a few more wherein Microsoft security engineers explain in their 2002 "Darknet" paper why all DRM like this is doomed to fail. (Photo reproduced under CC license courtesy of bkrpr, original here.)

In a reprise of his famous argument against DRM delivered to Microsoft executives in 2004, Cory Doctorow recently appeared before book publishers at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference to explain to leaders of the publishing industry why DRM on digital books is bad for customers, bad for authors, and bad for business.

Cory reminded his audience of something they have probably already heard from their own customers: no one likes DRM.

No one woke up this morning and thought, "gee, I wish there was a way I could do less with my music, maybe someone's offering that product today."